In an era that witnessed the rise of celebrity outlaws like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger was the most famous and flamboyant of them all. Reports on the man and his misdeeds—spiced with accounts of his swashbuckling bravado and cool daring—provided a Depression-weary America with a salacious and irresistible tale of sex and violence. Elliott Gorn offers a riveting account of a year beginning in the summer of 1933, when the Dillinger's gang pulled more than a dozen bank jobs and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a dozen men—police, FBI agents, gangsters, and civilians—lost their lives in the rampage. Even today, Dillinger is the subject of pulp literature, serious poetry and fiction, and film. What is the power of his story and why has it lingered so long? Gorn illuminates the significance of Dillinger's tremendous fame and the endurance of his legacy in the American imagination: "Dillinger proved that the old American fascination with movement, with flight, with lighting out for the territories was still alive, still glorious, even if the journey lasted only long enough to flame out and die. To die, his friends would add, not like a rat, but like a man."